Material handling vehicles are designed in a variety of configurations to perform a variety of tasks. These types of vehicles are commonly used in a warehouse or a factory to transport, store, and retrieve materials and finished goods.
In warehousing operations, material quantities and inventory turnover rates are increasing rapidly. Therefore, to maintain competitiveness, it is important for warehousing operations to ensure that each piece of equipment, and each employee is productive. Recent studies, in fact, have indicated that 70 percent to 80 percent of the cost of owning and operating a material handling vehicle is attributed to labor. For a warehouse to compete on the global level, continually improving operator productivity is vital to reducing costs. To meet these ends, warehouse management systems are frequently employed to, among other things, automatically measure and wirelessly transmit data to and from the material handling vehicle, and to monitor operator efficiency. In these warehouse management systems, a centralized computer system can be used to monitor inventory flow, maintenance status of fleets of industrial vehicles, operator performance parameters, and vehicle parameters.
To provide these telemetric functions, wiring harnesses and sensors are typically added to the vehicles in a fleet of material handling vehicles after manufacture. These wiring harnesses connect sensors and other devices into the system, and add a number of connection points within the vehicle. Because of the large number of connection points, these add-on systems can potentially fail.
It is desirable that the warehouse management system be able to review the efficiency of the vehicle fleet and determine when operational changes are required. Such changes include deploying the material handling vehicles to proper locations, acquiring additional material handling vehicles, and determining the different types of material handling vehicles needed.
It is further desirable to provide operator data and vehicle data to the truck operator in a manner that provides the most efficient use of the truck. In some arrangements, there can be multiple truck operator displays that display different types of data. One display can be provided that is integrated with the warehouse management system, as this can be an add-on system. Another display can be built into the vehicle that typically identifies vehicle related operational data, such as battery life and weight on the forks, for example. Not only do multiple displays make the vehicle operation less efficient for the vehicle operator, but the systems driving these displays are not well integrated, so the operator must understand the operation and functionality of more than one system and related display. What is needed is a display arrangement that solves the problems of prior vehicle display systems.